i. 4. Explosion Piece
Installation
Explosion Piece
Explosion Piece is a physical installation and print publication that began as a self-generated prompt for the intervention into an existing object:
1. Begin with something whole.
2. Blow it up into as many pieces as possible without letting the newly separate parts lose all meaning.
3. Consider this new state of chaos.
4. Collect the fragments.
5. Re-order them to create something new.
These instructions were expanded into a list of action verbs that informed a series of physical interventions in books that had been taken out of library circulation or sold in discount bins at used book shops. Every book in this work is a collection catalog of some sort—it features furniture encyclopedias, antique collection catalogs, museum inventory lists, and books of art collections. Each book began as a mini archive in and of itself.
This project started with an interest in the form of the codex and evolved into a series of experiments (or explosions). It involved turning books inside out, dissecting them, deconstructing them, exploding the contents of individual volumes into other ones, and recombining texts and images from disparate sources. The collection that emerged is a 3-dimension installation that asks how meaning can be (re)made when text and image are remixed and reassembled in new ways.
Explosion Piece uses a strict methodology to guide a process of making that explores the book as both an artifact and container of knowledge, as well as the relational quality of visual form and language, and our shared impulse to collect, preserve, order, and archive in order to make sense of the world around us. This project was installed at the RISD Fleet Library in May 2023, and featured multiple exploded book objects, a one-minute stop-motion video, and a print publication that includes photographic compositions of the physical artifacts.
—Installation (deconstructed books, CRTV, aluminum tables)
—Print Publication (spiral bound): 11” x 17”